Art

Recording the Insect Ecology of a Prison Reclaimed by Nature

Cell 25 in Block 9 of Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary is now a cabinet of curiosities representing the animal life of this stabilized ruin.

Interview

On Leaving the Brooklyn Museum After 17 Years: An Interview with Arnold Lehman

Last September, Arnold Lehman announced that he would retire from his position as the director of the Brooklyn Museum.

In Brief

"Hologram" Protesters March Against Troubling New Anti-Terror Law

Thousands took part in a virtual march in the streets of Madrid last Friday night to protest the new Citizens’ Securities Law’s Reform law that will have a chilling effect on public protests.

Opinion

Required Reading

This week, overcharging billionaire art collectors, the recent fascination with medieval art, the world's last male white rhino, discovering the previous life of Jean-Honoré Fragonard's “Young Girl Reading,” and more.

Opinion

Weekend Words: Dry

In response to a prolonged dry spell, the state of California has instituted mandatory water restrictions, bringing to mind the line from Chinatown (1974): "Middle of a drought, the water commissioner drowns. Only in L.A."

Art

Brenda Goodman’s Recent Paintings

I want to believe that this is the beginning of the art world’s real and enduring appreciation of Brenda Goodman’s hard won achievement.

Art

Imagining the Ordinary: Heatherwick Studio at the Hammer Museum

With its new show, Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, portrays itself as a kind of exploratory museum.

Art

Recurring Waves of Arrival: Elaine de Kooning’s Portraits, from Loft Dwellers to JFK

I felt as if I were actually seeing that elusive moment in her perception when the person standing or sitting before her passed from patchwork anonymity into an emergent distinctiveness.

Art

Back to the Future with Steve DiBenedetto

Steve DiBenedetto’s current exhibition, Mile High Psychiatry, at Derek Eller marks a breakthrough for a painter who is best known for his encrusted surfaces jam-packed with helicopters, octopi and neural networks.

In Brief

Google's Online Museum Adds 3D Animal Skulls and Sculptures

The Google Cultural Institute, known for empowering internauts to Street View their way through museums and look very, very closely at digitized two-dimensional artworks, has ventured into the third dimension.

Art

The Fantastical Paradoxes of Afrofuturist Film

Imaginative, aesthetic, historically fixated, and cosmically liberated, afrofuturism could be subject to low budgets, racism, sexism, and indifference, and still count itself a master of radiant ideas.

Art

Sum of the Arts

Years a message in a bottle was floating in the Baltic Sea until its discovery by a fisherman = 101